In recent months, however, a
batch of reports on the state of
human development in India ask
whether there have been commensurate advances in the lives
of a majority of its people,
whose contributions will be
needed for even better national
growth — and above all, their
own well-being.

In global terms, India ranks

131 out of 188 countries on the
UN’s 2016 Human Development
index, behind such countries as
Namibia, Guyana and Honduras,
and just ahead of Timor Leste,
Congo and Bangladesh. Norway
ranks at Number 1 and the
Central African Republic at 188.

India spends less on health
than most if not all countries in
the top tier of high-living standards and global influence. It
exports the finest
medical specialists
at every level of
the profession,
while back in India
local health care is
minimal or
exploitive at the
hands of shoddy
storefront clinics
run by dubiously
qualified practitioners. Corruption
adds to the weakness in medical
services.

Schools for thepoor are oftenunderstaffed and devoid ofequipment, ensuring that hun-dreds of millions of children willnever get a shot at a productivelife built on educational excel-lence. The New York Timesrecently reported from SanFrancisco that Infosys plans tohire 10,000 Americans to serveclients in the United States. Thearticle acknowledged that newlimitations on foreign visa pro-grams under the Trump adminis-tration obviously played a signif-icant part in this decision. Butdifficulty finding sufficientlyskilled labor in India was anoth-er motivating factor. The Timesreport said that a study of

36,000 engineering students at

500 Indian colleges found that
only 5 percent of them could
write software code properly.

In January of this year, the
British medical
journal, The
Lancet, produced a
grim summary of
the health situation, saying that
India ranks 143 out
of 184 countries on
track to meet the
relevant United
Nations
Sustainable
Development
Goals. The journal
notes that India
records more
deaths of children

5 years old oryounger than any other country,accounts for a quarter of theworld’s tuberculosis casesincluding drug-resistant strains,and sees high levels of prema-ture cardiovascular disease andan epidemic of diabetes.India is considered a high-risknation for infectious as well asnoncommunicable diseases,including malaria, dengue,chikungunya, hepatitis A and E,yellow fever and rabies. Foodand water-borne illnesses andsickness from contact with ani-mals are common.

Lifestyle Related Illnesses

The Lancet cites two studies
from Goa on lifestyle-related illnesses: “Depression and alcohol
misuse are common problems
with huge treatment gaps in
low-income and middle-income
countries. In India, for instance,
suicide is the leading cause of
death in people aged 15–29
years,” the Lancet reported.

Even measuring gaps is not easy.

“India vastly underperforms interms of quality clinicalresearch. Only 1 percent of globalclinical trials are done in India;and between 2005–14, fewerthan half the medical colleges inthe country published a singleresearch article.

In a separate report, The
Lancet wrote that India is one of
the three leading countries in
total number of male smokers —
China and Indonesia are the
other two — and also in the top
three, with China and the United
States, for women who smoke.

The health of childbearing-age Indian women is furthercompromised by poor and oftenlife-threatening family planningservices, which still rely heavilyon risky and sometimes fatalsterilization, often in produc-tion-line “sterilization camps,”accounting for up to 80 percentof all preventive “modern”Then there is sanitation, orthe lack of it, which affects notonly health but also privacy, dig-nity and the functioning of com-munities. In mid-April of thisyear, Human Rights Watch pub-lished a report, “Going to theToilet When You Want:Sanitation as a Human Right.” Itargued: “There is a clear rela-tionship between the right tosanitation and the right to edu-cation. Lack of clean water andsanitation can increase the riskfor waterborne illnesses anddiarrheal disease, and lessen theamount of time children are inschool. According to WorldHealth Organization estimates,88 percent of deaths from diar-rheal disease can be attributed tolack of clean water, sanitation,and hygiene.”In the case of India, casteenters prominently into the pic-ture. People of the highestcastes, a minority of Indians,may live scrupulously clean

Above, beggars, who have come to the city from various parts of Gujarat, have made Mumbai’s Andheri skywalk their home. Below, a young girl studying in a slum in Mumbai.
India lags behind such countries as Namibia, Guyana and Honduras, and just ahead of Timor Leste, Congo and Bangladesh in United Nations Human Development Index.